


La Rue

by finch (afinch)



Category: Classical Music RPF
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-24
Updated: 2011-12-24
Packaged: 2017-10-28 00:00:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/301531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/afinch/pseuds/finch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is Chopin, this is the world, this is Paris, this is God, this is the soul.</p>
            </blockquote>





	La Rue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [eris](https://archiveofourown.org/users/eris/gifts).



Here is a cafe.  
Here is a cafe at the end of the street.  
Here is a cafe at the end of the street in Paris.  
Here is a cafe at the end of the street in Paris, where Chopin sat.

It is where the imagination must take hold. Imagine a frail, broken man, sitting and sipping at his coffee. What went through his head? Did the music chime in his soul at all waking hours of the day and night? Did he dream of ivory and black, ivory and black, and the way the notes played against the strings of the universe, vibrating though time and the vast ocean of space.

Did he sit alone? In the end he was so alone, it's hard to think of such a genius sitting alone, with the soul of the cosmos inside his head. They should send a musician with the poet, to describe the incredible beauty. All Chopin could do was try to play the beauty he already saw. How many of us truly listen? Or do we look at our own chairs and tables and tea and scones and see them as just that? Do we sit alone, wide and truly alone, without exquisite profoundness nibbling at the surface?

Perhaps George Sand sat across from him. They had tea. It may well have been the last time they had tea together, so much of that is uncertain. So quietly did they go into that night, good and bad, it was hard to follow them again. Their last tea, their last fight, their last kiss. First kisses hold so much promise, but so do last kisses. The breakup was quiet, a slipping away of souls into the night, no more tea for them.

Oh, but what a joy it would have been, to see one more tea with the once vitriolic, once besotted, now embittered couple. There is such promise in couples as well. There is the hope that the music will spark within them and the melody they create together cannot help but be more than the sum of the whole of its parts.

Maybe they would have talked about Solange, or his health, or happier times between the two of them. Make no mistake, George Sand was good for Chopin, teased the music out of his head with a sweet tenderness that still reverberates in his music to this day. She pushed on the ocean, desperately, and willed it to push back - and how he pushed. How he pushed against her, in Majorca, and steady as the rain falling, he took the rain and played it back.

No matter, they would have been at the cafe, ordering their coffee and scones, and being nothing less than the center of the universe to each other at that moment. Even in their most bitter of moments, they were the world to each other. Even when she could not love him the same way that he loved her, loved the twinges of his piano, there was promise in them. Promise that they could find a way to overcome all the odds.

It is not to be so. Everything that they were is in the past and all that can happen is for them to move. Ten long years of entwined lives and now there is nothing. There is nothing, Chopin played with nothing, played with the spaces between the notes and made them sing for us regardless. His work is nothing of the 1812 Overture, of The Seasons, of the notes dropping in the right place. His notes drop in the _only_ place.

There is a sadness here, above the chairs, you can feel it, feel the hum of Chopin's agony. Such cruel agony that produced such sweetness. It is interesting, isn't it, the things that shape us? Pianos left on islands, daughters that aren't yours, debilitating illnesses that creep into your soul and demand expression. Perhaps even the soft hue of Paris.

Listen to his music, the way it moves in your soul, there is no heart-wrenching, there is only exquisite beauty that can only be rivaled by God himself. If music is the poetry of God, then the piano is both the first opening line and the last lingering phrase.

Count the chairs like bars, as they play you up and up and up, swirl you in the ecstasy of heaven, then gently guide you down and leave you with breathless wonder. Count the spaces between, and everything between the spaces and the notes, count the chairs again. Every time you do, there is something new, something even more profound and moving and beautiful than the last time. The wonder of Chopin is that he is never old. He is suspended within infinity, and dances within in it when his music fills the room and the people close their eyes and hope when they make it to heaven, this awaits them.

Sip your tea and fall though the layers and layers and layers, the nocturne that nestles in your soul and will not quit until you are embraced deep in the arms of sleep. Embraced deep in the arms of dreams, a soft lullaby guiding you through the suspension of reality.

Nibble your scones and tap tap tap tap tap through a revolution of beauty so powerful you cannot help but cry. It is in the tears that true beauty is found. It is in the tears that true purity is found.

This is Chopin, this is the world, this is Paris, this is God, this is the soul.

How could a man in so much pain produce so much beauty? Did he know what he was destined for? Did he know his lover would leave him, did he know he would die penniless, did he know, as he touched the keys and touched our hearts, that his legacy was forever?

Or did he just sip his tea, eat his scones, converse with George Sand and leave the world to its own desires?

Here is a cafe at the end of the street in Paris, where Chopin sat.  
Here is a cafe at the end of the street in Paris.  
Here is a cafe at the end of the street.  
Here is a cafe.


End file.
